At that most comforting hour – closing in on dusk when the Kozhikode sun finally recalled its scorching rays and bowed out – Kiran Desai seemed approachable. Stepping down from a podium at the Kerala Literature Festival (KLF), where she was asked about dialects and diaspora, the writer stood alongside women in scarves for photographs and replied to unsolicited questions which were not all about her books.
Could great writers really be so unmindful of the wavering climate that must have burnt their cheeks at noon and sent their hair flying at twilight? Why do we think writers must have moods like no one around them? Why expect them to be prickly in the real world and pleasant only within their creations?
In The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Kiran’s new novel that was on the 2025 Booker Prize Shortlist (twenty years after her first Booker win), Kiran wrote that Indians don’t behave well because we think there won’t be any consequences.
She was talking about unhappily lasting relationships: Indians are not taught how to leave nor how to be left. It isn’t in our vocabulary. We’re only taught how to stay despite absolutely everything. That's partly why we don't behave well. We think there won’t be any consequence to behaving badly.
When, without an appointment or introduction, she was stopped on the sandy beach with pleas for interviews, would Kiran have revisited her own writing and thought: “there it is, our collective bad behaviour"?
The book is a romance. But the romance is almost disguised, in the way love can't glue itself to one lone person but crawls over to past and new relationships and families far away.
Sonia and Sunny – the two main characters – don't even meet for a good two hundred pages. Then again, it is a book about relationships in the way stories and perspectives can’t be tied to one another but need to change hands. Off and on, the two lovers leave the pages to allow space for the others tied to them, like a long-widowed mother or a newly single father.
Fiction can easily evaporate from the minds of readers who like to replace the heroine with the author and conclude they now know the writer all too well.
But Kiran appears to be nowhere near Sonia or Sunny or their combined loneliness. Her presence is felt when you stop at the end of paragraphs and go back to read them again and admire them word by word, in case some of them might stick to you and fall on your screen when you need them.
Should we get up and eat strawberry jam for happiness?- Ilan
It is romance that tries to be inconspicuous despite the chain of events that has to happen to bring Sonia, entrapped in a labyrinth of toxic love, to the premises of Sunny, confused and clueless.
Perhaps because Kiran has been living in the US since she was 16, she does not fall back on the hope of faraway writers who like to imagine the country small enough to have their two forlorn characters bump into each other in a New York street. Kiran puts her people in the mid-1990s when a proposal – the old-fashioned way, arranged by families back home – has to go from India to the US through the hands of grandparents and parents.
An arranged marriage story, even one that ended six months later in a divorce, felt true and false. True because it happened. False, because it was feeding the West what it wanted to consume about the East.- Sonia
Sonia, in a moment of extreme brokenheartedness, had wept through an overseas phone call and asked for the help of family to end her loneliness. Dadaji promptly took a letter to the next-door colonel (another grandpa) with an unusually mediocre description of the beautiful Sonia to send to his grandson in New York.
This is the same Dadaji who had twice not allowed his daughter, Mina Foi, to unite with her lover, despite the failure of a marriage he had forced her into. Two decades later, his cruelty had not abated, but a granddaughter in distress prompted an act of love.
Character arcs are a treat in Kiran’s world. You meet them and peel their layers little by little, enjoying their flawed thoughts more than their righteous reasoning. Babitha, the uptight, unrelenting, petty and pretentious mother to Sunny and widow of an honest man, can easily become a favourite.
Writing an unlikeable character must have taken a lot of effort – one imagines many discarded drafts and rounds of rewriting. Wouldn’t there be an unquenchable urge to make her thoughts nice, humane? But 'nice' is how her own thoughts must have sounded to Babitha, just as it does to most humans who edit their memories.
Poor Babitha. Isn't she judged easily because she doesn't take the trouble to camouflage her prejudices and cheats herself to feel charitable?
Sonia is not so easily peeled when, as a young student, she seems inexplicably charmed by a much older artist, formulaically falling into a hurtful, loveless, respectless affair. Perhaps it prepares her for the future when she can more readily express herself before Sunny, a man she can see as an equal.
If bad things swallow you, you can’t see the bad things- Sonia
Sunny, contrarily, is readable. There are no layers to hide his thoughts from his speech or action. Personally, it is interesting that as a journalist, Sunny makes relatable attempts at creating stories about a man with incredibly long nails or writes essays weaving in a favourite writer. Sonia, trying to be a writer of fiction, also changes tack to report to magazines, as aspiring writers often do when they realise no one hires unknowns to write novels.
The only trying part is the romance, but as mentioned, it is kept to a minimum, and whole lives don’t suddenly revolve around one for another. For Sonia, there is the awfully interesting Mama with a German father who takes off to a remote house to read books and live freely in her middle age. There is also the supposedly cruel Papa, who somehow ends up funny and adorable through the pages.
Years go by. You hear about world events – September 11 in New York and 2002 in Gujarat. Kiran’s characters, living in a much earlier time, have not learnt to be careful of what they speak when they speak about religion, country and food. They remain unharmed, though you, the reader, living in the future, still fear for them. The walls have ears; you ache to tell them.
But Kiran is too tethered to her homeland to listen. She pours out the Indianness of the diaspora and America’s criticism of itself.
A good novel reader was a toilet cleaner, and so Indians did not wish to be readers of novels as this would undo caste hierarchies and divides that made their world go around properly.
Sprawling sagas can be taxing and even the most loyal reader might wish for a chopping of pages, but it can take so long for characters to imprint themselves and leave behind new thoughts that you then reshape for yourself.
Kiran Desai – as last seen trudging on the Kozhikode beach – must look at the setting sun and revel in knowing that. Or would she have let out those flawed humans after tussling with them for so many years in a motley world of readers that included the curly-haired woman asking her for an interview on the beach?